There have been protests against extremist Jews last week as well in Israel. I think the orthodox right will see a backlash from the mainstream Israeli press and people and will have to retreat in the coming years.

An American girl attempting to walk to her Jewish school in Israel is subjected to daily taunting and physical intimidation so bad that she says it makes her afraid to go to school. Her tormenters aren't fellow children, but rather adult men upset by the presence of the "immodest" girls attending school in their ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. And now, the town's male residents are clashing with police and media over their the gender integration they say insults their faith. Eight-year-old girls can be such whores.

The case of 8-year-old Naama Margolese, who was born in Chicago, has upset some Israelis, and for good reason. She says she's afraid to walk to her all-girls school in Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem, because of taunting from Ultra-Orthodox men. They spit on her, call her a whore, throw rocks, and shout at her. As a result, Naama says her "tummy hurts" when she walks to school.

Not that it should matter, but Margolese isn't full glitzing down the street in a Nicki Minaj outfit, gaily skipping off to Toddlers & Tiaras & Kippahs school during these impromptu stoning sessions; she's walking to an Orthodox all girls' school in her uniform, which consists of a long skirt, a high-necked, long sleeved shirt. But the clothing of Naama and her classmates, modest by nearly any other standard, are not modest enough for the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men of Beit Shemesh. Parents attempting to escort their daughters to the school are also subjected to the same treatment.

In recent months, tension between the secular, Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Beit Shemesh have escalated, especially with the erection of an all-girls school the Ultra-Orthodox say is encroachment on their beliefs. The community has erected signs warning sidewalk walkers to remain separated by gender and deployed "modesty patrols" designed to make sure the natural sluttery of women is kept in check. (I feel like I've heard this one before...)

The Israeli government doesn't support segregation of the sexes or the agenda of the Ultra-Orthodox, but, according to MSNBC, they have "turned a blind eye" to much of the community's practices while awarding them generous government subsidies, as the minority fundamentalist population typically kept their hands (and rocks) to themselves. But now that the group, which comprises about 10% of Israel's population, is becoming more aggressive, police have stepped in, and they've also found themselves the objects of the group's derision. Yesterday, protesters pelted police with rocks when they attempted to remove illegal gender segregating signs, lit some garbage cans on fire, and called a news crew who attempted to film the signs "anti-Semitic." Talk about stoning the messenger.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken out strongly against the conduct of Beit Shemesh, saying that those responsible would be stopped and arrested.

Fringe group responds to minor perceived trespass on their ideology with violent overreaction that escalates into something totally out of control that ends up harming everyone involved? People are called bigots because they dared identify something as bigotry? The world continues apace.

not long ago hinduism handed out same treatment to women.
it's to the credit of people that they have come out of that mentality.
it's not beacause of any religion . it's inspitew of being from that particular religion.

Jews around the world have been shocked by the story of Na'ama: the eight-year-old girl from a religious family in Beit Shemesh who was spat on, cursed and insulted by religious extremists as she made her way to school.

While Israel's leadership has condemned the violence, members of the local ultra-Orthodox community justified the attacks, claiming the child was immodestly dressed. Journalists reporting the story have been repeatedly attacked and pelted with the eggs by ultra-Orthodox Jews who are also trying to impose segregated streets in the city.

A sign cautioning women to dress modestly hanging on a building in the town of Beit Shemesh, December 25, 2011.

Assaults on vulnerable young girls or grown women are outrageous. Such attacks are not the work of modest people. Genuinely righteous people devote their energy to mastering their own passions; not to assaulting others. Rav Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel, wrote that where our quest for piety conflicts with innate morality, we should reexamine our religious principles, for they have almost certainly been corrupted (Orot Hakodesh volume 3, p. 27). The attacks on women and children are a perfect illustration of this. They are outrageous criminal acts whose perpetrators should be punished with the full force of the law.

In this tense atmosphere, we need to consider what standards of dress are appropriate in a modern, democratic Jewish state and whether one segment of the population has the right to impose its views on the rest of society.

Parallel debates took place in England a number of years ago regarding Britain's most popular newspaper, The Sun, with its daily photographs of topless models. Many considered these images offensive and degrading to women, but when a group of parliamentarians attempted to have them banned, they were ridiculed in the press, mocked in Parliament and their efforts defeated.

Apparently, many Englishmen considered it their right to gape at these pictures. Attempts at censorship of this soft-pornography were viewed with the same resentment that many of us view Haredi efforts to enforce their standards of modesty on the rest of Israeli society.

Following the failed campaign, one Member of Parliament published some of the letters of support she had received from women across the country. Some of the most moving communications came from elementary school teachers who described innocently asking their pupils to bring old newspapers to school to cover their desks for art lessons. When the children unfolded their newspapers, the teachers found that their classrooms were decked out with pictures of semi-naked women. "How can we educate our daughters to respect their own bodies in this climate?" they lamented. Some suggested that the high levels of anorexia nervosa and teenage pregnancy in Britain are due in no small measure to the overly sexualized society and particularly the media.

Judaism teaches that sexuality is sacred and beautiful, but that its beauty is preserved by cloaking it in modesty including modesty in dress which enables men and women to live with self-respect and respect for one another.

In the Talmud (Kiddushin 82a), we find that rabbis adopted a wide range of standards of modesty. Some felt comfortable chatting to women outside the bathhouse and dancing with brides on their shoulders, while others eschewed even the shortest conversation with women. The medieval Talmudic commentator the Ritvah explains these apparent inconsistencies by suggesting that some of the laws of modesty must be dictated by self-awareness. Each person should know what boundaries they need to ensure that their behavior conforms to Jewish standards of decency and holiness.

While classic Jewish sources assert the need for modest dress, the nature of the requirements is not precisely defined. The result is that even within the religious world; different communities have adopted varying standards of acceptable dress.

Despite our differences, somehow, we all need to live together. In the Diaspora, the need for this tolerance is obvious. Jews of all types share the streets with gentiles and no one dares to force their sartorial requirements on others.

Observant Israelis should proudly preserve their halachik standards and traditions while exemplifying the highest moral and ethical standards which earn the admiration of others, rather than bringing contempt upon our faith. We must all learn to talk to people with different beliefs so that we can live together and build the State of Israel as a model society for all its inhabitants.

JERUSALEM â€” A bus pulls up to a stop in Jerusalem and the waiting crowd divides -- men flock to the front and women to the back, an illustration, activists say, of a disturbing trend of gender segregation.

Israel's Supreme Court has ruled that the buses, which serve Israel's most conservative, ultra-Orthodox communities, cannot enforce separation between the sexes.

But activists say that has not stopped the most religious elements of Israeli society from trying to impose strict gender divides on the country's largely secular population.

They say the trend affects women's access to public services, their ability to mourn publicly, and even the depiction of women in billboard advertising, posing a threat to Israel's democracy.

But conservative Jews say their growing numbers and the increasing "permissiveness" of Israeli society justify measures to help them observe their religious practices.

The issue of gender segregation is not new in Israel, where many observe religious practices that promote "modesty" and restrict mingling of the sexes.

But activists say ultra-Orthodox Jews, who constitute around 10 percent of the population, have become increasingly "radical" on the issue and are winning concessions that harm women.

Rachel Azaria, a member of Jerusalem city council, first came up against the issue when she approached a company to have her campaign posters placed on the side of Jerusalem buses while running for office in 2008.

"They said in Jerusalem you can't have women on posters on the buses because the ultra-Orthodox don't approve of it," she told AFP.

She challenged the ban successfully, but later found herself taking on Jerusalem's secular mayor Nir Barkat over the city's unofficial policy of not using female images in its posters.

"I feel that multi-culturalism took over and suddenly the majority couldn't say anything because we had to take into consideration the smaller groups," she said.

Orly Erez-Likhovski, a lawyer with the Israel Religious Action Centre who worked on the bus segregation campaign, says there are many other battlegrounds.

Posters featuring women are defaced, city councils hold sex-segregated events and religious soldiers walk out of army events where female troops sing.

Even funerals, which are almost exclusively presided over by ultra-Orthodox rabbis, are mostly sex-segregated, and women are sometimes barred from speaking, she says.

Erez-Likhovski insists that most ultra-Orthodox oppose such extreme measures, blaming a "radical segment" that has cowed both the community and secular society.

While the fight over bus segregation has been running for years, Erez-Likhovski says there has been an increase in attempts to exclude women from public space.

"It's sort of a backlash: as general society becomes more and more modern, the ultra-Orthodox society tries to become more and more closed in opposition to the growing modernisation of Israeli society," she said.

Ultra-Orthodox rabbi Shmuel Jakobovits agrees.

"The permissiveness in society has become so much more rampant," he told AFP. "Today when a deeply religious person has to go through certain parts of town... he encounters many things that he would not want to see.

"The traditional religious view sees men and women... as being equal but separate in social contexts. In a perfect religious world that would be the norm," he added.

Jakobovits said the best solution was for secular and religious society to exist as separately as possible, but Erez-Likhovski said Israel's leaders should draw a line at the issue of segregation.

"When I'm talking about public services, public space, we should never allow any segregation or exclusion of women.

"This is a democracy: whether we talk about Mea Shearim or in Tel Aviv, it's the same," she said, referring to an ultra-Orthodox quarter in Jerusalem.

"I don't say we should do something out of spite, but we're talking about the public sphere and it should be democratic."

Azaria agrees, and says she feels the tide is turning in Israel against concessions on sex-separation, citing Jerusalem's recent decision to reintroduce adverts featuring women's faces.

"I think now, people are against it. In the past everybody said there's nothing you can do because of the ultra-Orthodox, but now finally they realise it is something that has to be fought against."